Religion and Churches - Separation of Church and State - Politics - God - Christianity - Islam - New York Times 






August 19, 2007
The Politics of God 
By MARK LILLA
I. The Will of God Will Prevail
The twilight of the idols has been postponed. For more than two centuries, from 
the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world 
politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class 
and social justice, race and national identity  these were the questions that 
divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again 
resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts 
over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are 
disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it 
incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, 
leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that 
human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, 
that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.
An example: In May of last year, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran sent an 
open letter to President George W. Bush that was translated and published in 
newspapers around the world. Its theme was contemporary politics and its 
language that of divine revelation. After rehearsing a litany of grievances 
against American foreign policies, real and imagined, Ahmadinejad wrote, If 
Prophet Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, Joseph or Jesus Christ (peace be upon 
him) were with us today, how would they have judged such behavior? This was not 
a rhetorical question. I have been told that Your Excellency follows the 
teachings of Jesus (peace be upon him) and believes in the divine promise of the 
rule of the righteous on Earth, Ahmadinejad continued, reminding his fellow 
believer that according to divine verses, we have all been called upon to 
worship one God and follow the teachings of divine Prophets. There follows a 
kind of altar call, in which the American president is invited to bring his 
actions into line with these verses. And then comes a threatening prophecy: 
Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the 
ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight 
can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and 
thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. . . . Whether we like it or not, the 
world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of 
God will prevail over all things.
This is the language of political theology, and for millennia it was the only 
tongue human beings had for expressing their thoughts about political life. It 
is primordial, but also contemporary: countless millions still pursue the 
age-old quest to bring the whole of human life under Gods authority, and they 
have their reasons. To understand them we need only interpret the language of 
political theology  yet that is what we find hardest to do. Reading a letter 
like Ahmadinejads, we fall mute, like explorers coming upon an ancient 
inscription written in hieroglyphics.
The problem is ours, not his. A little more than two centuries ago we began to 
believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and 
that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though 
this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing 
process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or 
colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, 
especially in its Islamic form  as an atavism requiring psychological or 
sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even 
if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, 
irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We 
live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe those on the opposite 
bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to 
think as they do. We all face the same questions of political existence, yet 
their way of answering them has become alien to us. On one shore, political 
institutions are conceived in terms of divine authority and spiritual 
redemption; on the other they are not. And that, as Robert Frost might have put 
it, makes all the difference.
Understanding this difference is the most urgent intellectual and political task 
of the present time. But where to begin? The case of contemporary Islam is on 
everyones mind, yet is so suffused with anger and ignorance as to be 
paralyzing. All we hear are alien sounds, motivating unspeakable acts. If we 
ever hope to crack the grammar and syntax of political theology, it seems we 
will have to begin with ourselves. The history of political theology in the West 
is an instructive story, and it did not end with the birth of modern science, or 
the Enlightenment, or the American and French Revolutions, or any other 
definitive historical moment. Political theology was a presence in Western 
intellectual life well into the 20th century, by which time it had shed the 
mind-set of the Middle Ages and found modern reasons for seeking political 
inspiration in the Bible. At first, this modern political theology expressed a 
seemingly enlightened outlook and was welcomed by those who wished liberal 
democracy well. But in the aftermath of the First World War it took an 
apocalyptic turn, and new men eager to embrace the future began generating 
theological justifications for the most repugnant  and godless  ideologies of 
the age, Nazism and Communism.
It is an unnerving tale, one that raises profound questions about the fragility 
of our modern outlook. Even the most stable and successful democracies, with the 
most high-minded and civilized believers, have proved vulnerable to political 
messianism and its theological justification. If we can understand how that was 
possible in the advanced West, if we can hear political theology speaking in a 
more recognizable tongue, represented by people in familiar dress with familiar 
names, perhaps then we can remind ourselves how the world looks from its 
perspective. This would be a small step toward measuring the challenge we face 
and deciding how to respond.
II. The Great Separation
Why is there political theology? The question echoes throughout the history of 
Western thought, beginning in Greek and Roman antiquity and continuing down to 
our day. Many theories have been proposed, especially by those suspicious of the 
religious impulse. Yet few recognize the rationality of political theology or 
enter into its logic. Theology is, after all, a set of reasons people give 
themselves for the way things are and the way they ought to be. So let us try to 
imagine how those reasons might involve God and have implications for politics.
Imagine human beings who first become aware of themselves in a world not of 
their own making. Their world has unknown origins and behaves in a regular 
fashion, so they wonder why that is. They know that the things they themselves 
fashion behave in a predictable manner because they conceive and construct them 
with some end in mind. They stretch the bow, the arrow flies; that is why they 
were made. So, by analogy, it is not difficult for them to assume that the 
cosmic order was constructed for a purpose, reflecting its makers will. By 
following this analogy, they begin to have ideas about that maker, about his 
intentions and therefore about his personality.
In taking these few short steps, the human mind finds itself confronted with a 
picture, a theological image in which God, man and world form a divine nexus. 
Believers have reasons for thinking that they live in this nexus, just as they 
have reasons for assuming that it offers guidance for political life. But how 
that guidance is to be understood, and whether believers think it is 
authoritative, will depend on how they imagine God. If God is thought to be 
passive, a silent force like the sky, nothing in particular may follow. He is a 
hypothesis we can do without. But if we take seriously the thought that God is a 
person with intentions, and that the cosmic order is a result of those 
intentions, then a great deal can follow. The intentions of such a God reveal 
something man cannot fully know on his own. This revelation then becomes the 
source of his authority, over nature and over us, and we have no choice but to 
obey him and see that his plans are carried out on earth. That is where 
political theology comes in.
One powerful attraction of political theology, in any form, is its 
comprehensiveness. It offers a way of thinking about the conduct of human 
affairs and connects those thoughts to loftier ones about the existence of God, 
the structure of the cosmos, the nature of the soul, the origin of all things 
and the end of time. For more than a millennium, the West took inspiration from 
the Christian image of a triune God ruling over a created cosmos and guiding men 
by means of revelation, inner conviction and the natural order. It was a 
magnificent picture that allowed a magnificent and powerful civilization to 
flower. But the picture was always difficult to translate theologically into 
political form: God the Father had given commandments; a Redeemer arrived, 
reinterpreting them, then departed; and now the Holy Spirit remained as a 
ghostly divine presence. It was not at all clear what political lessons were to 
be drawn from all this. Were Christians supposed to withdraw from a corrupted 
world that was abandoned by the Redeemer? Were they called upon to rule the 
earthly city with both church and state, inspired by the Holy Spirit? Or were 
they expected to build a New Jerusalem that would hasten the Messiahs return?
Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians argued over these questions. The City of 
Man was set against the City of God, public citizenship against private piety, 
the divine right of kings against the right of resistance, church authority 
against radical antinomianism, canon law against mystical insight, inquisitor 
against martyr, secular sword against ecclesiastical miter, prince against 
emperor, emperor against pope, pope against church councils. In the late Middle 
Ages, the sense of crisis was palpable, and even the Roman Church recognized 
that reforms were in order. But by the 16th century, thanks to Martin Luther and 
John Calvin, there was no unified Christendom to reform, just a variety of 
churches and sects, most allied with absolute secular rulers eager to assert 
their independence. In the Wars of Religion that followed, doctrinal differences 
fueled political ambitions and vice versa, in a deadly, vicious cycle that 
lasted a century and a half. Christians addled by apocalyptic dreams hunted and 
killed Christians with a maniacal fury they had once reserved for Muslims, Jews 
and heretics. It was madness.
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes tried to find a way out of this labyrinth. 
Traditionally, political theology had interpreted a set of revealed divine 
commands and applied them to social life. In his great treatise Leviathan 
(1651), Hobbes simply ignored the substance of those commands and talked instead 
about how and why human beings believed God revealed them. He did the most 
revolutionary thing a thinker can ever do  he changed the subject, from God and 
his commands to man and his beliefs. If we do that, Hobbes reasoned, we can 
begin to understand why religious convictions so often lead to political 
conflicts and then perhaps find a way to contain the potential for violence.
The contemporary crisis in Western Christendom created an audience for Hobbes 
and his ideas. In the midst of religious war, his view that the human mind was 
too weak and beset by passions to have any reliable knowledge of the divine 
seemed common-sensical. It also made sense to assume that when man speaks about 
God he is really referring to his own experience, which is all he knows. And 
what most characterizes his experience? According to Hobbes, fear. Mans natural 
state is to be overwhelmed with anxiety, his heart all the day long gnawed on 
by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity. He has no repose, nor pause of 
his anxiety, but in sleep. It is no wonder that human beings fashion idols to 
protect themselves from what they most fear, attributing divine powers even, as 
Hobbes wrote, to men, women, a bird, a crocodile, a calf, a dog, a snake, an 
onion, a leek. Pitiful, but understandable.
And the debilitating dynamics of belief dont end there. For once we imagine an 
all-powerful God to protect us, chances are well begin to fear him too. What if 
he gets angry? How can we appease him? Hobbes reasoned that these new religious 
fears were what created a market for priests and prophets claiming to understand 
Gods obscure demands. It was a raucous market in Hobbess time, with stalls for 
Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Quakers, 
Ranters, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy Men and countless others, each with his 
own path to salvation and blueprint for Christian society. They disagreed with 
one another, and because their very souls were at stake, they fought. Which led 
to wars; which led to more fear; which made people more religious; which. . . .
Fresh from the Wars of Religion, Hobbess readers knew all about fear. Their 
lives had become, as he put it, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. And 
when he announced that a new political philosophy could release them from fear, 
they listened. Hobbes planted a seed, a thought that it might be possible to 
build legitimate political institutions without grounding them on divine 
revelation. He knew it was impossible to refute belief in divine revelation; the 
most one can hope to do is cast suspicion on prophets claiming to speak about 
politics in Gods name. The new political thinking would no longer concern 
itself with Gods politics; it would concentrate on men as believers in God and 
try to keep them from harming one another. It would set its sights lower than 
Christian political theology had, but secure what mattered most, which was 
peace.
Hobbes was neither a liberal nor a democrat. He thought that consolidating power 
in the hands of one man was the only way to relieve citizens of their mutual 
fears. But over the next few centuries, Western thinkers like John Locke, who 
adopted his approach, began to imagine a new kind of political order in which 
power would be limited, divided and widely shared; in which those in power at 
one moment would relinquish it peacefully at another, without fear of 
retribution; in which public law would govern relations among citizens and 
institutions; in which many different religions would be allowed to flourish, 
free from state interference; and in which individuals would have inalienable 
rights to protect them from government and their fellows. This 
liberal-democratic order is the only one we in the West recognize as legitimate 
today, and we owe it primarily to Hobbes. In order to escape the destructive 
passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by 
political philosophy centered on man. This was the Great Separation.
III. The Inner Light
It is a familiar story, and seems to conclude with a happy ending. But in truth 
the Great Separation was never a fait accompli, even in Western Europe, where it 
was first conceived. Old-style Christian political theology had an afterlife in 
the West, and only after the Second World War did it cease to be a political 
force. In the 19th and early 20th centuries a different challenge to the Great 
Separation arose from another quarter. It came from a wholly new kind of 
political theology heavily indebted to philosophy and styling itself both modern 
and liberal. I am speaking of the liberal theology movement that arose in 
Germany not long after the French Revolution, first among Protestant 
theologians, then among Jewish reformers. These thinkers, who abhorred 
theocracy, also rebelled against Hobbess vision, favoring instead a political 
future in which religion  properly chastened and intellectually reformed  
would play an absolutely central role.
And the questions they posed were good ones. While granting that ignorance and 
fear had bred pointless wars among Christian sects and nations, they asked: Were 
those the only reasons that, for a millennium and a half, an entire civilization 
had looked to Jesus Christ as its savior? Or that suffering Jews of the Diaspora 
remained loyal to the Torah? Could ignorance and fear explain the beauty of 
Christian liturgical music or the sublimity of the Gothic cathedrals? Could they 
explain why all other civilizations, past and present, founded their political 
institutions in accordance with the divine nexus of God, man and world? Surely 
there was more to religious man than was dreamed of in Hobbess philosophy.
That certainly was the view of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who did more than anyone 
to develop an alternative to Hobbes. Rousseau wrote no treatise on religion, 
which was probably a wise thing, since when he inserted a few pages on religious 
themes into his masterpiece, mile (1762), it caused the book to be burned and 
Rousseau to spend the rest of his life on the run. This short section of 
mile, which he called The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, has so 
deeply shaped contemporary views of religion that it takes some effort to 
understand why Rousseau was persecuted for writing it. It is the most beautiful 
and convincing defense of mans religious instincts ever to flow from a modern 
pen  and that, apparently, was the problem. Rousseau spoke of religion in terms 
of human needs, not divine truths, and had his Savoyard vicar declare, I 
believe all particular religions are good when one serves God usefully in them. 
For that, he was hounded by pious Christians.
Rousseau had a Hobbes problem, too: he shared the Englishmans criticisms of 
theocracy, fanaticism and the clergy, but he was a friend of religion. While 
Hobbes beat the drums of ignorance and fear, Rousseau sang the praises of 
conscience, of charity, of fellow feeling, of virtue, of pious wonder in the 
face of Gods creation. Human beings, he thought, have a natural goodness they 
express in their religion. That is the theme of the Profession of Faith, which 
tells the parable of a young vicar who loses his faith and then his moral 
compass once confronted with the hypocrisy of his co-religionists. He is able to 
restore his equilibrium only when he finds a new kind of faith in God by looking 
within, to his own inner light (lumire intrieure). The point of Rousseaus 
story is less to display the crimes of organized churches than to show that man 
yearns for religion because he is fundamentally a moral creature. There is much 
we cannot know about God, and for centuries the pretense of having understood 
him caused much damage to Christendom. But, for Rousseau, we need to believe 
something about him if we are to orient ourselves in the world.
Among modern thinkers, Rousseau was the first to declare that there is no shame 
in saying that faith in God is humanly necessary. Religion has its roots in 
needs that are rational and moral, even noble; once we see that, we can start 
satisfying them rationally, morally and nobly. In the abstract, this thought did 
not contradict the principles of the Great Separation, which gave reasons for 
protecting the private exercise of religion. But it did raise doubts about 
whether the new political thinking could really do without reference to the 
nexus of God, man and world. If Rousseau was right about our moral needs, a 
rigid separation between political and theological principles might not be 
psychologically sustainable. When a question is important, we want an answer to 
it: as the Savoyard vicar remarks, The mind decides in one way or another, 
despite itself, and prefers being mistaken to believing in nothing. Rousseau 
had grave doubts about whether human beings could be happy or good if they did 
not understand how their actions related to something higher. Religion is simply 
too entwined with our moral experience ever to be disentangled from it, and 
morality is inseparable from politics.
IV. Rousseaus Children
By the early 19th century, two schools of thought about religion and politics 
had grown up in the West. Let us call them the children of Hobbes and the 
children of Rousseau. For the children of Hobbes, a decent political life could 
not be realized by Christian political theology, which bred violence and stifled 
human development. The only way to control the passions flowing from religion to 
politics, and back again, was to detach political life from them completely. 
This had to happen within Western institutions, but first it had to happen 
within Western minds. A reorientation would have to take place, turning human 
attention away from the eternal and transcendent, toward the here and now. The 
old habit of looking to God for political guidance would have to be broken, and 
new habits developed. For Hobbes, the first step toward achieving that end was 
to get people thinking about  and suspicious about  the sources of faith.
Though there was great reluctance to adopt Hobbess most radical views on 
religion, in the English-speaking world the intellectual principles of the Great 
Separation began to take hold in the 18th century. Debate would continue over 
where exactly to place the line between religious and political institutions, 
but arguments about the legitimacy of theocracy petered out in all but the most 
forsaken corners of the public square. There was no longer serious controversy 
about the relation between the political order and the divine nexus; it ceased 
to be a question. No one in modern Britain or the United States argued for a 
bicameral legislature on the basis of divine revelation.
The children of Rousseau followed a different line of argument. Medieval 
political theology was not salvageable, but neither could human beings ignore 
questions of eternity and transcendence when thinking about the good life. When 
we speculate about God, man and world in the correct way, we express our noblest 
moral sentiments; without such reflection we despair and eventually harm 
ourselves and others. That is the lesson of the Savoyard vicar.
In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the Terror and Napoleons conquests, 
Rousseaus children found a receptive audience in continental Europe. The recent 
wars had had nothing to do with political theology or religious fanaticism of 
the old variety; if anything, people reasoned, it was the radical atheism of the 
French Enlightenment that turned men into beasts and bred a new species of 
political fanatic. Germans were especially drawn to this view, and a wave of 
romanticism brought with it great nostalgia for the religious world we have 
lost. It even touched sober philosophers like Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. 
Kant adored mile and went somewhat further than Rousseau had, not only 
accepting the moral need for rational faith but arguing that Christianity, 
properly reformed, would represent the true universal Church and embody the 
very idea of religion. Hegel went further still, attributing to religion an 
almost vitalistic power to forge the social bond and encourage sacrifice for the 
public good. Religion, and religion alone, is the original source of a peoples 
shared spirit, which Hegel called its Volksgeist.
These ideas had an enormous impact on German religious thought in the 19th 
century, and through it on Protestantism and Judaism throughout the West. This 
was the century of liberal theology, a term that requires explanation. In 
modern Britain and the United States, it was assumed that the intellectual, and 
then institutional, separation of Christianity and modern politics had been 
mutually beneficial  that the modern state had benefited by being absolved from 
pronouncing on doctrinal matters, and that Christianity had benefited by being 
freed from state interference. No such consensus existed in Germany, where the 
assumption was that religion needed to be publicly encouraged, not reined in, if 
it was to contribute to society. It would have to be rationally reformed, of 
course: the Bible would have to be interpreted in light of recent historical 
findings, belief in miracles abandoned, the clergy educated along modern lines 
and doctrine adapted to a softer age. But once these reforms were in place, 
enlightened politics and enlightened religion would join hands.
Protestant liberal theologians soon began to dream of a third way between 
Christian orthodoxy and the Great Separation. They had unshaken faith in the 
moral core of Christianity, however distorted it may have been by the forces of 
history, and unshaken faith in the cultural and political progress that 
Christianity had brought to the world. Christianity had given birth to the 
values of individuality, moral universalism, reason and progress on which German 
life was now based. There could be no contradiction between religion and state, 
or even tension. The modern state had only to give Protestantism its due in 
public life, and Protestant theology would reciprocate by recognizing its 
political responsibilities. If both parties met their obligations, then, as the 
philosopher F. W. J. Schelling put it, the destiny of Christianity will be 
decided in Germany.
Among Jewish liberal thinkers, there was a different sort of hope, that of 
acceptance as equal citizens. After the French Revolution, a fitful process of 
Jewish emancipation began in Europe, and German Jews were more quickly 
integrated into modern cultural life than in any other European country  a 
fateful development. For it was precisely at this moment that German Protestants 
were becoming convinced that reformed Christianity represented their national 
Volksgeist. While the liberal Jewish thinkers were attracted to modern 
enlightened faith, they were also driven by the apologetic need to justify 
Judaisms contribution to German society. They could not appeal to the 
principles of the Great Separation and simply demand to be left alone. They had 
to argue that Judaism and Protestantism were two forms of the same rational 
moral faith, and that they could share a political theology. As the Jewish 
philosopher and liberal reformer Hermann Cohen once put it, In all intellectual 
questions of religion we think and feel ourselves in a Protestant spirit.
V. Courting the Apocalypse
This was the house that liberal theology built, and throughout the 19th century 
it looked secure. It wasnt, and for reasons worth pondering. Liberal theology 
had begun in hope that the moral truths of biblical faith might be 
intellectually reconciled with, and not just accommodated to, the realities of 
modern political life. Yet the liberal deity turned out to be a stillborn God, 
unable to inspire genuine conviction among a younger generation seeking ultimate 
truth. For what did the new Protestantism offer the soul of one seeking union 
with his creator? It prescribed a catechism of moral commonplaces and historical 
optimism about bourgeois life, spiced with deep pessimism about the possibility 
of altering that life. It preached good citizenship and national pride, economic 
good sense and the proper length of a gentlemans beard. But it was too ashamed 
to proclaim the message found on every page of the Gospels: that you must change 
your life. And what did the new Judaism bring to a young Jew seeking a 
connection with the traditional faith of his people? It taught him to appreciate 
the ethical message at the core of all biblical faith and passed over in genteel 
silence the fearsome God of the prophets, his covenant with the Jewish people 
and the demanding laws he gave them. Above all, it taught a young Jew that his 
first obligation was to seek common ground with Christianity and find acceptance 
in the one nation, Germany, whose highest cultural ideals matched those of 
Judaism, properly understood. To the decisive questions  Why be a Christian? 
and Why be a Jew?  liberal theology offered no answer at all.
By the turn of the 20th century, the liberal house was tottering, and after the 
First World War it collapsed. It was not just the barbarity of trench warfare, 
the senseless slaughter, the sight of burned-out towns and maimed soldiers that 
made a theology extolling modern civilization contemptible. It was that so 
many liberal theologians had hastened the insane rush to war, confident that 
Gods hand was guiding history. In August 1914, Adolf von Harnack, the most 
respected liberal Protestant scholar of the age, helped Kaiser Wilhelm II draft 
an address to the nation laying out German military aims. Others signed an 
infamous pro-war petition defending the sacredness of German militarism. 
Astonishingly, even Hermann Cohen joined the chorus, writing an open letter to 
American Jews asking for support, on the grounds that next to his fatherland, 
every Western Jew must recognize, revere and love Germany as the motherland of 
his modern religiosity. Young Protestant and Jewish thinkers were outraged when 
they saw what their revered teachers had done, and they began to look elsewhere.
But they did not turn to Hobbes, or to Rousseau. They craved a more robust 
faith, based on a new revelation that would shake the foundations of the whole 
modern order. It was a thirst for redemption. Ever since the liberal theologians 
had revived the idea of biblical politics, the stage had been set for just this 
sort of development. When faith in redemption through bourgeois propriety and 
cultural accommodation withered after the Great War, the most daring thinkers of 
the day transformed it into hope for a messianic apocalypse  one that would 
again place the Jewish people, or the individual Christian believer, or the 
German nation, or the world proletariat in direct relation with the divine.
Young Weimar Jews were particularly drawn to these messianic currents through 
the writings of Martin Buber, who later became a proponent of interfaith 
understanding but as a young Zionist promoted a crude chauvinistic nationalism. 
In an early essay he called for a Masada of the spirit and proclaimed: If I 
had to choose for my people between a comfortable, unproductive happiness . . . 
and a beautiful death in a final effort at life, I would have to choose the 
latter. For this final effort would create something divine, if only for a 
moment, but the other something all too human. Language like this, with strong 
and discomforting contemporary echoes for us, drew deeply from the well of 
biblical messianism. Yet Buber was an amateur compared with the Marxist 
philosopher Ernst Bloch, who used the Bible to extol the utopia then under 
construction in the Soviet Union. Though an atheist Jew, Bloch saw a connection 
between messianic hope and revolutionary violence, which he admired from a 
distance. He celebrated Thomas Mntzer, the 16th-century Protestant pastor who 
led bloody peasant uprisings and was eventually beheaded; he also praised the 
brutal Soviet leaders, famously declaring ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem  wherever 
Lenin is, there is Jerusalem.
But it was among young Weimar Protestants that the new messianic spirit proved 
most consequential. They were led by the greatest theologian of the day, Karl 
Barth, who wanted to restore the drama of religious decision to Christianity and 
rejected any accommodation of the Gospel to modern sensibilities. When Hitler 
came to power, Barth acquitted himself well, leading resistance against the Nazi 
takeover of the Protestant churches before he was forced into exile in 1935. But 
others, who employed the same messianic rhetoric Barth did, chose the Nazis 
instead. A notorious example was Emanuel Hirsch, a respected Lutheran theologian 
and translator of Kierkegaard, who welcomed the Nazi seizure of power for 
bringing Germany into the circle of the white ruling peoples, to which God has 
entrusted the responsibility for the history of humanity. Another was Friedrich 
Gogarten, one of Barths closest collaborators, who sided with the Nazis in the 
summer of 1933 (a decision he later regretted). In the 1920s, Gogarten rejoiced 
at the collapse of bourgeois Europe, declaring that we are glad for the 
decline, since no one enjoys living among corpses, and called for a new 
religion that attacks culture as culture . . . that attacks the whole world. 
When the brownshirts began marching and torching books, he got his wish. After 
Hitler completed his takeover, Gogarten wrote that precisely because we are 
today once again under the total claim of the state, it is again possible, 
humanly speaking, to proclaim the Christ of the Bible and his reign over us.
All of which served to confirm Hobbess iron law: Messianic theology eventually 
breeds messianic politics. The idea of redemption is among the most powerful 
forces shaping human existence in all those societies touched by the biblical 
tradition. It has inspired people to endure suffering, overcome suffering and 
inflict suffering on others. It has offered hope and inspiration in times of 
darkness; it has also added to the darkness by arousing unrealistic expectations 
and justifying those who spill blood to satisfy them. All the biblical religions 
cultivate the idea of redemption, and all fear its power to inflame minds and 
deafen them to the voice of reason. In the writings of these Weimar figures, we 
encounter what those orthodox traditions always dreaded: the translation of 
religious notions of apocalypse and redemption into a justification of political 
messianism, now under frightening modern conditions. It was as if nothing had 
changed since the 17th century, when Thomas Hobbes first sat down to write his 
Leviathan.
VI. Miracles
The revival of political theology in the modern West is a humbling story. It 
reminds us that this way of thinking is not the preserve of any one culture or 
religion, nor does it belong solely to the past. It is an age-old habit of mind 
that can be reacquired by anyone who begins looking to the divine nexus of God, 
man and world to reveal the legitimate political order. This story also reminds 
us how political theology can be adapted to circumstances and reassert itself, 
even in the face of seemingly irresistible forces like modernization, 
secularization and democratization. Rousseau was on to something: we seem to be 
theotropic creatures, yearning to connect our mundane lives, in some way, to the 
beyond. That urge can be suppressed, new habits learned, but the challenge of 
political theology will never fully disappear so long as the urge to connect 
survives.
So we are heirs to the Great Separation only if we wish to be, if we make a 
conscious effort to separate basic principles of political legitimacy from 
divine revelation. Yet more is required still. Since the challenge of political 
theology is enduring, we need to remain aware of its logic and the threat it 
poses. This means vigilance, but even more it means self-awareness. We must 
never forget that there was nothing historically inevitable about our Great 
Separation, that it was and remains an experiment. In Europe, the political 
ambiguities of one religion, Christianity, happened to set off a political 
crisis that might have been avoided but wasnt, triggering the Wars of Religion; 
the resulting carnage made European thinkers more receptive to Hobbess 
heretical ideas about religious psychology and the political implications he 
drew from them; and over time those political ideas were liberalized. Even then, 
it was only after the Second World War that the principles of modern liberal 
democracy became fully rooted in continental Europe.
As for the American experience, it is utterly exceptional: there is no other 
fully developed industrial society with a population so committed to its faiths 
(and such exotic ones), while being equally committed to the Great Separation. 
Our political rhetoric, which owes much to the Protestant sectarians of the 17th 
century, vibrates with messianic energy, and it is only thanks to a strong 
constitutional structure and various lucky breaks that political theology has 
never seriously challenged the basic legitimacy of our institutions. Americans 
have potentially explosive religious differences over abortion, prayer in 
schools, censorship, euthanasia, biological research and countless other issues, 
yet they generally settle them within the bounds of the Constitution. Its a 
miracle.
And miracles cant be willed. For all the good Hobbes did in shifting our 
political focus from God to man, he left the impression that the challenge of 
political theology would vanish once the cycle of fear was broken and human 
beings established authority over their own affairs. We still make this 
assumption when speaking of the social causes of fundamentalism and political 
messianism, as if the amelioration of material conditions or the shifting of 
borders would automatically trigger a Great Separation. Nothing in our history 
or contemporary experience confirms this belief, yet somehow we cant let it go. 
We have learned Hobbess lesson too well, and failed to heed Rousseaus. And so 
we find ourselves in an intellectual bind when we encounter genuine political 
theology today: either we assume that modernization and secularization will 
eventually extinguish it, or we treat it as an incomprehensible existential 
threat, using familiar terms like fascism to describe it as best we can. Neither 
response takes us a step closer to understanding the world we now live in.
It is a world in which millions of people, particularly in the Muslim orbit, 
believe that God has revealed a law governing the whole of human affairs. This 
belief shapes the politics of important Muslim nations, and it also shapes the 
attitudes of vast numbers of believers who find themselves living in Western 
countries  and non-Western democracies like Turkey and Indonesia  founded on 
the alien principles of the Great Separation. These are the most significant 
points of friction, internationally and domestically. And we cannot really 
address them if we do not first recognize the intellectual chasm between us: 
although it is possible to translate Ahmadinejads letter to Bush from Farsi 
into English, its intellectual assumptions cannot be translated into those of 
the Great Separation. We can try to learn his language in order to create 
sensible policies, but agreement on basic principles wont be possible. And we 
must learn to live with that.
Similarly, we must somehow find a way to accept the fact that, given the 
immigration policies Western nations have pursued over the last half-century, 
they now are hosts to millions of Muslims who have great difficulty fitting into 
societies that do not recognize any political claims based on their divine 
revelation. Like Orthodox Jewish law, the Muslim Shariah is meant to cover the 
whole of life, not some arbitrarily demarcated private sphere, and its legal 
system has few theological resources for establishing the independence of 
politics from detailed divine commands. It is an unfortunate situation, but we 
have made our bed, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Accommodation and mutual 
respect can help, as can clear rules governing areas of tension, like the status 
of women, parents rights over their children, speech offensive to religious 
sensibilities, speech inciting violence, standards of dress in public 
institutions and the like. Western countries have adopted different strategies 
for coping, some forbidding religious symbols like the head scarf in schools, 
others permitting them. But we need to recognize that coping is the order of the 
day, not defending high principle, and that our expectations should remain low. 
So long as a sizable population believes in the truth of a comprehensive 
political theology, its full reconciliation with modern liberal democracy cannot 
be expected.
VII. The Opposite Shore
This is not welcome news. For more than two centuries, promoters of 
modernization have taken it for granted that science, technology, urbanization 
and education would eventually disenchant the charmed world of believers, and 
that with time people would either abandon their traditional faiths or transform 
them in politically anodyne ways. They point to continental Europe, where belief 
in God has been in steady decline over the last 50 years, and suggest that, with 
time, Muslims everywhere will undergo a similar transformation. Those 
predictions may eventually prove right. But Europes rapid secularization is 
historically unique and, as we have just seen, relatively recent. Political 
theology is highly adaptive and can present to even educated minds a more 
compelling vision of the future than the prospect of secular modernity. It takes 
as little for a highly trained medical doctor to fashion a car bomb today as it 
took for advanced thinkers to fashion biblically inspired justifications of 
fascist and communist totalitarianism in Weimar Germany. When the urge to 
connect is strong, passions are high and fantasies are vivid, the trinkets of 
our modern lives are impotent amulets against political intoxication.
Realizing this, a number of Muslim thinkers around the world have taken to 
promoting a liberal Islam. What they mean is an Islam more adapted to the 
demands of modern life, kinder in its treatment of women and children, more 
tolerant of other faiths, more open to dissent. These are brave people who have 
often suffered for their efforts, in prison or exile, as did their predecessors 
in the 19th century, of which there were many. But now as then, their efforts 
have been swept away by deeper theological currents they cannot master and 
perhaps do not even understand. The history of Protestant and Jewish liberal 
theology reveals the problem: the more a biblical faith is trimmed to fit the 
demands of the moment, the fewer reasons it gives believers for holding on to 
that faith in troubled times, when self-appointed guardians of theological 
purity offer more radical hope. Worse still, when such a faith is used to bestow 
theological sanctification on a single form of political life  even an 
attractive one like liberal democracy  the more it will be seen as 
collaborating with injustice when that political system fails. The dynamics of 
political theology seem to dictate that when liberalizing reformers try to 
conform to the present, they inspire a countervailing and far more passionate 
longing for redemption in the messianic future. That is what happened in Weimar 
Germany and is happening again in contemporary Islam.
The complacent liberalism and revolutionary messianism weve encountered are not 
the only theological options. There is another kind of transformation possible 
in biblical faiths, and that is the renewal of traditional political theology 
from within. If liberalizers are apologists for religion at the court of modern 
life, renovators stand firmly within their faith and reinterpret political 
theology so believers can adapt without feeling themselves to be apostates. 
Luther and Calvin were renovators in this sense, not liberalizers. They called 
Christians back to the fundamentals of their faith, but in a way that made it 
easier, not harder, to enjoy the fruits of temporal existence. They found 
theological reasons to reject the ideal of celibacy, and its frequent violation 
by priests, and thus returned the clergy to ordinary family life. They then 
found theological reasons to reject otherworldly monasticism and the 
all-too-worldly imperialism of Rome, offering biblical reasons that Christians 
should be loyal citizens of the state they live in. And they did this, not by 
speaking the apologetic language of toleration and progress, but by rewriting 
the language of Christian political theology and demanding that Christians be 
faithful to it.
Today, a few voices are calling for just this kind of renewal of Islamic 
political theology. Some, like Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the 
University of California, Los Angeles, challenge the authority of todays 
puritans, who make categorical judgments based on a literal reading of scattered 
Koranic verses. In Abou El Fadls view, traditional Islamic law can still be 
applied to present-day situations because it brings a subtle interpretation of 
the whole text to bear on particular problems in varied circumstances. Others, 
like the Swiss-born cleric and professor Tariq Ramadan, are public figures whose 
writings show Western Muslims that their political theology, properly 
interpreted, offers guidance for living with confidence in their faith and 
gaining acceptance in what he calls an alien abode. To read their works is to 
be reminded what a risky venture renewal is. It can invite believers to 
participate more fully and wisely in the political present, as the Protestant 
Reformation eventually did; it can also foster dreams of returning to a more 
primitive faith, through violence if necessary, as happened in the Wars of 
Religion.
Perhaps for this reason, Abou El Fadl and especially Ramadan have become objects 
of intense and sometimes harsh scrutiny by Western intellectuals. We prefer 
speaking with the Islamic liberalizers because they share our language: they 
accept the intellectual presuppositions of the Great Separation and simply want 
maximum room given for religious and cultural expression. They do not practice 
political theology. But the prospects of enduring political change through 
renewal are probably much greater than through liberalization. By speaking from 
within the community of the faithful, renovators give believers compelling 
theological reasons for accepting new ways as authentic reinterpretations of the 
faith. Figures like Abou El Fadl and Ramadan speak a strange tongue, even when 
promoting changes we find worthy; their reasons are not our reasons. But if we 
cannot expect mass conversion to the principles of the Great Separation  and we 
cannot  we had better learn to welcome transformations in Muslim political 
theology that ease coexistence. The best should not be the enemy of the good.
In the end, though, what happens on the opposite shore will not be up to us. We 
have little reason to expect societies in the grip of a powerful political 
theology to follow our unusual path, which was opened up by a unique crisis 
within Christian civilization. This does not mean that those societies 
necessarily lack the wherewithal to create a decent and workable political 
order; it does mean that they will have to find the theological resources within 
their own traditions to make it happen.
Our challenge is different. We have made a choice that is at once simpler and 
harder: we have chosen to limit our politics to protecting individuals from the 
worst harms they can inflict on one another, to securing fundamental liberties 
and providing for their basic welfare, while leaving their spiritual destinies 
in their own hands. We have wagered that it is wiser to beware the forces 
unleashed by the Bibles messianic promise than to try exploiting them for the 
public good. We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by divine 
revelation. All we have is our own lucidity, which we must train on a world 
where faith still inflames the minds of men. 
Mark Lilla is professor of the humanities at Columbia University. This essay is 
adapted from his book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern 
West, which will be published next month. 


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